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Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Au Lapin Agile - Montmartre's Hidden Gem

Lapin Agile is a famous Montmartrecabaret, at 22 Rue des Saules, 18th arrondissement of Paris, France.
It was originally called "Cabaret des Assassins". Tradition relates
that the cabaret received this name because a band of assassins broke in
and killed the owner's son. The cabaret was more than twenty years old
when, in 1875, the artist Andre Gill
painted the sign that was to suggest its permanent name. It was a
picture of a rabbit jumping out of a saucepan, and residents began
calling their neighborhood night-club "Le Lapin à Gill", meaning "Gill's
rabbit".
Over time the name evolved into "Cabaret Au Lapin Agile", or, the
Nimble Rabbit Cabaret. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Lapin
Agile was a favorite spot for struggling artists and writers, including Picasso, Modigliani, Apollinaire, and Utrillo.
The Lapin Agile is located in the center of the Montmartre district
in the 18th arrondissement of Paris, behind and slightly northwest of
Sacre Coeur Basilica. Since this was the heart of artistic Paris at the
turn of the twentieth century, there was much discussion at the cabaret
about "the meaning of art".
Au Lapin Agile also was popular with questionable Montmartre
characters including pimps, eccentrics, simple down-and-outers, a
contingent of local anarchists, as well as with students from the Latin Quarter, all mixed with a sprinkling of well-heeled bourgeois out on a lark.
Pablo Picasso's 1905 oil painting "At the Lapin Agile" helped to make
this cabaret world famous. The cabaret was often captured on canvas by
another Montmartre artist, Maurice Utrillo.
In 1993 Americancomedian and entertainer, Steve Martin, wrote a play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, which had a successful run in Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. The play depicted an imagined meeting between Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein at the Lapin Agile.
Today, many people visit the Lapin Agile, sitting at wooden tables
where initials have been carved into the surfaces for decades. Located
in a stone building on the steep and cobbled Rue des Saules, the cabaret
presents visitors with French songs dating back as far as the fifteenth
century.

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